A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

It is a country which the Communist revolutionaries who ruled only four decades ago would not recognize. True believers still exist. One spoke to me reverently of Mao’s rise to power and service to the Chinese people. However, she is the exception, at least among China’s younger professionals.

Indeed, younger educated Chinese could not be further from Communist cadres once determined to create a revolution. The former are socially active, desire the newest technologies, and worry about going to good schools and getting good jobs. Cynicism about corrupt and unelected leaders is pervasive.

If there is one common belief, it is hostility toward government Internet controls. Students have complained to me in class about their inability to get to many websites and readily shared virtual private networks to circumvent state barriers.

But such opinions are not held only by the young. A high school student told me that his father urged him to study in America because of Beijing’s restrictions on freedom.

While Chinese from all walks of life are comfortable telling foreigners what they think, sharing those beliefs with other Chinese is problematic. The media, of course, is closely controlled. Internet sites are blocked, deleted, and revamped. Unofficial intimidation, legal restrictions, and even prison time await those who criticize Communist officialdom on social media and blogs.

But increasingly globalized Chinese are aware of their online disadvantage compared to their peers in the West. Google, YouTube, and Twitter are verboten. Today Bloomberg and the New York Times are beyond reach.

Last week as BBC television began to detail official abuses my TV went black. A couple minutes later BBC was back, after the China report had finished.

While internet and media restrictions have not prevented rapid economic growth, barring the PRC’s best and brightest to a world of information is likely to dampen innovation and entrepreneurship. Moreover, those denied their full freedoms are more likely to leave home. Many of China’s wealthiest citizens have been departing an authoritarian system unbounded by the rule of law.

Repression also stultifies China’s political evolution to a more mature and stable political order. Democracy provides an important safety valve for popular dissent.

The Chinese Communist Party’s control may not be as firm as often presumed. The oppressive establishment which most Chinese have faced for most of their lives is Communist.

Indeed, for many if not most party members, Communism is a means of personal advancement, even enrichment. President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign is popular, but is widely seen as politically motivated.

Moreover, Xi has abrogated the well-understood “deal” of the last four decades, that rulers can retire and be immune from future prosecution. Will incumbents so readily yield power in the future?

Perhaps even more threatening for the CCP is the potential for an economic slowdown and consequent political unrest. Already protests are common against local governments, which tend to be ostentatiously rapacious. What if that antagonism shifts against the center?

A poorer PRC means a poorer world: China is a major supplier and increasingly important source of global demand. A politically unstable Beijing would have unpredictable effects on its neighbors.

As I wrote for Forbes online: “Since Mao’s death in 1976, the PRC has changed dramatically—and dramatically for the better. But this second revolution has stalled. Economic liberalization remains incomplete. Political reform never started. Individual liberty has regressed.”

The Chinese people deserve to be free. The Chinese nation would benefit from their freedom. The rest of the world would gain from a freer Chinese nation. Everyone desiring a peaceful and prosperous 21st century should hope for the successful conclusion of China’s second revolution.

Late last year, Reason magazine’s crack legal correspondent Damon Root chronicled the rise of the modern libertarian legal movement in his important new book, Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court. In it, he focused especially on the struggle that some of us have been engaged in for more than four decades to recast the terms of the debate over the proper role of the courts from “judicial activism” and “judicial restraint” to “judicial engagement” and “judicial abdication.” That shift has been crucial because it refocused the debate from judicial behavior to where it should have been all along, namely, on the proper interpretation of the law before the court.

The struggle to bring about that shift, although much further along than when it began decades ago, is far from finished: Witness hearings just two days ago before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts. Called by Subcommittee Chairman Ted Cruz in the wake of last month’s Supreme Court decisions in King v. Burwell, upholding Obamacare’s subsidies for insurance purchased through exchanges established by the federal government, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which made same-sex marriage the law of the land, the hearings were titled “With Prejudice: Supreme Court Activism and Possible Solutions.”

As the title suggests, committee conservatives, in the majority, remain focused on what they see as the Court’s activism. Their witnesses were two professional friends of mine, former Chapman Law Dean and now Professor John Eastman and Ethics and Public Policy Center President Ed Whelan. Nominally representing the liberal activist side was Duke Law Professor Neil Siegel.

I say “nominally” because Professor Siegel took pains early in his testimony to expose problems with the very idea of judicial activism. If defined in opposition to judicial deference, he said, many of the recent decisions of the Court’s “conservatives” would have to be called “activist.” But if the term is defined as engaging in legal infidelity, then we’re arguing not about activism or restraint but about whether the judge read the law correctly.

That’s right. In fact, “judicial engagement” emerged in libertarian thought mainly in opposition to calls from conservatives like Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia for courts to be more deferential to the political branches. But it was animated by the contention that the basic problem with conservative deference was its misreading of the law. In particular, under our Constitution, as Bork put it, majorities were entitled to rule in “wide areas” simply because they were majorities, even if in “some areas” minorities were entitled to be free from majority rule—to which many of us responded that that had the law exactly backwards, turning the Constitution on its head.

But having put his finger on the real source of the differences between the activist and restraint schools, Siegel then went on to illustrate why conservatives called the hearings in the first place, arguing that the Court got it right in both King and Obergefell. In King, Siegel said, Chief Justice John Roberts was right to ignore both the text at issue in the case and the rationale for that text and instead “to read the statute in context and as a whole.” Those, of course, are the kinds of words that enable courts to reach almost any conclusion they wish—to engage in the “activism” conservatives rightly condemn. On reading the law correctly here, credit the conservatives.

Somewhere amid the deluge, Lemieux reaches his main claim, which is that (somehow) I admitted: “the King lawsuit wasn’t designed to uphold the statute passed by Congress in 2010. It was intended to ‘enfranchise’ the people who voted against the bill.” I’m not quite sure what Lemieux means. But perhaps Lemieux doesn’t understand my point about how the Supreme Court helped President Obama disenfranchise his political opponents.

As all nine Supreme Court justices acknowledged in King, “the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase” is that Congress authorized the Affordable Care Act’s premium subsidies, employer mandate, and (to a large extent) individual mandate only in states that agreed to establish a health-insurance “Exchange.” That is, all nine justices agreed that the plain meaning of the operative statutory language allows states to veto key provisions of the ACA—sort of like the Medicaid veto that has existed for 50 years and lets states destroy health insurance for millions of poor Americans. The Exchange veto includes the power to shield millions of state residents from the ACA’s least-popular provisions: the individual mandate and the employer mandate.

Today the French celebrate the 226th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the date usually recognized as the beginning of the French Revolution. What should libertarians (or classical liberals) think of the French Revolution?

The Chinese premier Zhou Enlai is famously (but apparently inaccurately) quoted as saying, “It is too soon to tell.” I like to draw on the wisdom of another mid-20th-century thinker, Henny Youngman, who when asked “How’s your wife?” answered, “Compared to what?” Compared to the American Revolution, the French Revolution is very disappointing to libertarians. Compared to the Russian Revolution, it looks pretty good. And it also looks good, at least in the long view, compared to the ancien regime that preceded it.

Conservatives typically follow Edmund Burke’s critical view in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. They may even quote John Adams: “Helvetius and Rousseau preached to the French nation liberty, till they made them the most mechanical slaves; equality, till they destroyed all equity; humanity, till they became weasels and African panthers; and fraternity, till they cut one another’s throats like Roman gladiators.”

But there’s another view. And visitors to Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, get a glimpse of it when they see a key hanging in a place of honor. It’s one of the keys to the Bastille, sent to Washington by Lafayette by way of Thomas Paine. They understood, as the great historian A.V. Dicey put it, that “The Bastille was the outward visible sign of lawless power.” And thus keys to the Bastille were symbols of liberation from tyranny.

Traditionalist conservatives sometimes long for “the world we have lost” before liberalism and capitalism upended the natural order of the world. The diplomat Talleyrand said, “Those who haven’t lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution do not know the sweetness of living.” But not everyone found it so sweet. Lord Acton wrote that for decades before the revolution “the Church was oppressed, the Protestants persecuted or exiled, … the people exhausted by taxes and wars.” The rise of absolutism had centralized power and led to the growth of administrative bureaucracies on top of the feudal land monopolies and restrictive guilds.

The economic causes of the French Revolution are sometimes insufficiently appreciated. In his book The French Revolution: An Economic Interpretation, Florin Aftalion outlines some of those causes. The French state engaged in wars throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. To pay for the wars, it employed complex and burdensome taxation, tax farming, borrowing, debt repudiation and forced “disgorgement” from the financiers, and debasement of the currency. Lord Acton wrote that people had been anticipating revolution in France for a century. And revolution came.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man, issued a month after the fall of the Bastille, enunciated libertarian principles similar to those of the Declaration of Independence:

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights… .

2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression… .

4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights… .

“You ought not to forget that the credit system and the tax apparatus remain in the hands of the workers’ state and that this is a very important weapon in the struggle between state industry and private industry….

The pruning knife of taxation is a very important instrument. With it the workers’ state will be able to clip the young plant of capitalism, lest it thrive too luxuriously.”

–Leon Trotsky, The First 5 Years of the Comintern, Vol 2 (London, New Park, 1945) p. 341

I would like to tell you about a serious condition afflicting thousands of policy analysts. It’s called Petty Little Dictator Disorder, or PLDD, and you or someone you love could be suffering from this epidemic sweeping through our think tanks, advocacy groups, and government offices. According to the description pending for inclusion in the DSM V, here are the warning signs of PLDD:

Do you spend a fair amount of your time imagining how the government could be used to shape people’s behavior for their own good?

Do you tell yourself and others that you believe in liberty and stuff but there are negative externalities, information costs, and children who need protecting from their parents, so we need to step in?

Do you use the word “we” a lot to refer to government action by which you really mean you and your friends?

Do you consider yourself an expert despite having never really done anything or rigorously studied anything in your life?

Do you feel the need to communicate your expert opinions in no more than 140 characters more than 1,000 times a year because you need constant reinforcement in the belief that you are changing the world?

Do you sit in cafes or bars with your colleagues and have conversations that resemble dorm room pot-smoking bull sessions about how it would be best for families to live in apartments above bodegas with the sound of light rail roaring just outside their window because, after all, the life you currently have and enjoy is the same thing that families with three children and a dog should want?

Do you think science or a panel of experts can identify the right way to do almost anything?

My first, but not remotely my last, oped on the Supreme Court’s ruling in King v. Burwell appears in today’s Washington Examiner. Excerpt:

Obamacare supporters are mistaken if they think the Supreme Court’s King v. Burwell ruling settles the issue. Even in defeat, King threatens Obamacare’s survival, because it exposes Obamacare as an illegitimate law…

By overriding the operative language of the statute, the Supreme Court colluded with the president to impose taxes and entitlements that no Congress ever approved; to deprive states of powers Congress granted them to block parts of the ACA; and to disenfranchise Republican and independent voters who swept ACA opponents into state office in 2009, 2010 and 2011 for the purpose of blocking the ACA.

The Supreme Court did not lose its legitimacy with King v. Burwell — it has made worse mistakes. Obamacare did. Having been rewritten over and over by the president and the Supreme Court rather than Congress, Obamacare cannot claim to be a legitimate law.